Hansen was, as always, perched at his computer when I came in for the evening after my week off. That was about the only thing that was the same. The machine had been radically altered. The pronged pipe at the end was the same. Apparently, most of the impulse drives had a similar pipe -the thing generated force on the empty air and could generate exponentially more with more energy. If you stood in the field when it turned on it would feel a lot like the lurch you get on a roller coaster or carnival ride, not like something hit or shoved you. The frame itself was lower now, wider and more squat. There was also a big gas-powered generator providing electricity on the far end, and a transformer that let us control how much power was available to the drive.
A note here – A lot of this stuff was getting called all sorts of things while I was first working with Hansen. Motors, drives, devices, generators, etc. Jhonas Angat's discoveries and experiments were too new for standard terms to have settled in, especially as none of it really did anything beyond flare up and break. Let me give you the grade-school description of how this all worked. Apparently dark matter and dark energy exist in a state that cannot normally interact with any of the matter and energy that people can normally work with. Something about bosuns, I think. The stuff only normally interacts measurably with matter or energy when things are reaching the points where relativity begins to break down – when stuff gets really, really fast or really, really heavy. You know, speed of light and black hole level stuff.
Angat figured out how to use small amounts of energy to mimic relativistic effects, which in turn could draw dark matter into our state. The dark matter is usually presented as either an intense EM field or a burst of directed kinetic energy. For a little while, it looked like dark energy was going to get renamed 'Angat Radiation,' but somehow the press started to just call it 'plasma.' And then someone started referring to the state of being that dark whatever normally sat in as 'subspace.' Please don’t yell at me, none of this is my discovery, and I only wish I’d been able to control what people named this stuff.
After a point, I think it must have been inevitable for people to start using some of those names. A kinetic engine got referred to as an 'impulse drive,' and while the generators were initially just called 'Angat generators,' while they were just used to produce electricity, they eventually started getting called 'warp generators.' Because that makes all sorts of sense. Even to a humanities student like me. Lots of sense.
Anyways, Hansen had built an “impulse drive” in his lab. He said that the kinetic force variant was a bit more stable than the generator variant. The thing could generate about one horsepower using the energy of a couple of AAs. Briefly generate one horsepower. Briefly as in less than a tenth of a second. When they died, they usually just turned off. But it wasn't terribly uncommon for them to belch smoke, or start spraying hydraulic fluid, or make sparks, or other messy issues.
The big difference with Hansen's new build, other than the gas generator on the end, was that the area where the little gizmos had been socketed in was now a big flat space. He had gotten a light table from somewhere – you know, those things artists and drafters use to trace? Glass surface, bright lights underneath? The light table was one of those standing types, so it was up high, roughly level with my chest. The output pipe for the drive was unconnected from the rest, just a big alligator clamp sticking out of the end. Another alligator clamp sat where the machinery ended.
I was still inspecting the changes, wondering at the point of it all when the professor noticed me. He thrust out a paper at me. I recoiled a bit out of instinct, but he just said, “Sign it.”
My confusion was clear. I may have said, “Huh?” I might not have to, I'm sure my non-verbal communication was effective if I hadn't.
“It's the ownership agreement for lab work around here.” I took the paper – it was that same form that Steve had accidentally given me last month in her office.
The professor kept talking, “For patents. University researchers generate lots and lots of patents. Generally, the university owns those patents – just like a company owns the stuff its workers make. You follow? This isn't rocket science.”
I shook my head, “So what does that have to do with me? You're the researcher, I'm just the lab monkey.”
He shook his head this time, “You're my assistant, this experiment was at least partially your idea, so you own a portion of the discoveries your work enables. Standard agreement – University owns 30% of profits, and right of first refusal if the creator doesn't want to commercialize a discovery. Head researcher gets 51% of the profits, and control of the discoveries – although the funding organizations usually get a piece of that. The rest of the staff divides up the remaining 19%, with PHDs splitting 8%, PHD candidates getting 5%, grads getting 4%, and undergrads getting 2%.”
“Um... math...” I stammered.
“You get lucky, if we discover something useful. Because I am unlikeable and difficult to work with, apparently, you are the entirety of my staff, so you get the full nineteen percent, unless I happen to find someone else who loves me and isn’t a bigger idiot than you.”
“But you get nothing if we don't actually get a worthwhile discovery, so just sign the damn thing so we can get to work. I should have had you do this a month ago.” He growled again, turning back to his computer.
So, I signed the damn thing, and we got to work.
There was a large box in the corner that I hadn't noticed among the other changes in the room. There was a few dozen sheets of metal in it, all labeled and sorted. Copper, iron, steel, stainless steel, and gold foil stood out to me. There were a bunch of more technical names too – alloys of iron, copper, and other metals. Each sheet was about a foot and a half long, a few inches wide, and maybe a fingernail's thickness. Most of them were floppy enough to rattle loudly, and even wrinkle and fold if I wasn't careful with them. “So, here's what you're going to do. Right now, we're set for minimum power – we'll ramp up and compare once we finish the first round.”
“After you pointed out the burn patterns last week, I realized that I have no idea how the backwash of plasma is actually interacting with the materials in the drive. I’ve been seeing and smelling the smoke but never looked at what is actually happening. We do know that the plasma has the strongest effect on the material closest to the drive output. So these sheets will be the final linkup delivering charge to the drive. Anything that happens should happen first to the sheets.”
“Run the test until the machine fails. Turn the power off, take pictures, and log times and effects on each sheet. If the machine itself fails, I'll help you fix it and we keep going. I expect a few dozen runs until we get a break outside the sample material.”
“Got it, professor.” I set to work. This might actually be interesting. It could have been interesting. It wasn't.
For the first two rounds of testing the breaks were all upline from the inserted sheets – wiring in the drive itself broke instead of the sample material. Nothing worth recording happened. In the next three rounds, the only thing that happened worth mentioning is that I dropped a granite piece and broke the sample. It cracked the glass of the light table it was supposed to rest on too. I found some old pieces of ratty linoleum to pad the glass so I didn't completely destroy the table. It was easier than finding something more durable at the right height. Or rebuilding the drive to fit a random table we scrounged up. And on we went.
Oh, did I mention that each round of testing took me about a week and a half? Each run we had to track down and repair a fault in the drive. I had to log the fault too. Some nights we only managed two runs. We did eventually average one run every forty-five minutes though, so that was progress.
We had just cranked it up to two volts when something finally happened to one of the sheets. Actually, several things happened, all at once. I was zoned out on boredom and repetition at this point, so I really wasn't in a state where I could notice what exactly happened.
First was a loud bang – much louder than the drive normally put out when it flared. I’d probably have assumed it came from outside or another lab, except a burst of black smoke totally obscured the space over the drafting table, and what looked like my sample sheet shot into the air, trailing smoke and shattering a fluorescent bulb in the ceiling and adding that much more noise and debris to the atmosphere of Hansen's lab.
Hansen moved like he knew what was happening ahead of time – he was out of his computer chair and slapping the generator’s cutoff switch before the sheet of metal even hit the ground. Another step and he turned on the powerful fans in the ceiling, which began to suck the smoke out of the air through the big hood over the machine. I had thought those hoods were just relics of a previous set of experiments, I think I was more surprised by the working fans in them than I was with the sudden bang.
I was still a bit stunned when Hansen gingerly picked up my sheet. It had been cast iron, but now it was a dull sort of off-white. Almost an ugly beige, except for a pearlescent sheen that caught the light as the professor examined it. It wasn't shaped the same anymore, either. Instead of the precise squaring of the sample metal, it now looked like something had melted it into a flat puddle before hardening it again. You could even see ridges on one side where it had sunk into the cracks of the glass. I'm not sure which of us spoke. He picked it up with a pair of tongs, holding it up to examine closer.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“What the hell...”
We spent the rest of that shift cleaning up the mess. There was soot on pretty much everything – a lot of that cloud of smoke settled all over the room, despite the powerful fans cycling air through the room. Hansen backed up his computer and sent the whole thing to IT to clean or replace. Apparently, he'd had another computer burn out from crud sucked inside it, and had gotten a few lectures about how he should treat electronics. So he was taking preventative measures this time.
I did a quick sweep of the room with a broom – collected up a big pile of dust along with some broken glass and a few metal shavings. I was about to dump it when Hansen interrupted me, “Put that into a jar, we may want to test the samples later.” So that load of trash all went into a big glass specimen jar that I had to steal from the geology building next door.
That done, I got out my windex and rags, and cleaned the shelves, tables, instruments, and windows. I didn't clean the walls, though probably I should have. Then I mopped down the floors. Finally, I got a can of air, a few microfiber rags, and a few other tools and began to go over the impulse drive. Every little connection, every wire, chip, and solder joint had to be wiped down. Well, it probably didn't need to be wiped down quite so thoroughly – I can't imagine that dust on the frame or the heavily insulated power line from the generator would impact performance or testing, but I was Hansen's monkey, and I got to do Hansen's monkey work. Besides, he was the multiple-PhD, I was the English major undergrad.
That cloud was nasty. I finished my second semester with Hansen before I finished cleaning his drive. 2.7 GPA, I never did take a week off to study.
Towards the end of that semester, Steve called me into her office again. She had a deep tan, this time around. She had a few new tchotchkes made out of coconut on her desk and shelves. I guess she liked her spring break tropical. When I came in I was greeted again with the south end of a cat, scowling at me. I'm honestly not sure why those lip grooves didn't have a tan line, the disapproving pursed lips were a very natural expression on her.
“I got an email from Professor Hansen,” her expression somehow got even more negative. Maybe it was the eyebrows. They weren't drawn on, but they were narrow and curved tight around her eyes.
“He wants you to work full time through the summer, and maybe next fall too. I'm not sure if that's going to work.”
“I don't mind working for him, it's better than sweeping and emptying garbage cans.” This might have been the most dishonest thing I'd ever said to Steve, given that I had spent most of the last month sweeping and wiping.
“You're the only person I've ever heard say so. Most of his assistants quit before the semester is up.” The lips finally un-pursed, and she attempted a smile. The smile bared teeth, sure, but nothing else moved, not even her cheeks.
“You've been doing well this last year, but you're still a concern to us. We don't want to see you fail. Students in your situation who take a semester off or work full time are at risk. We really don't want you to drop out without a degree. And Hansen especially worries me – if you get into a problem the way all the rest of his help as you'll be even more likely to fail.”
She put her smile away while she waited for me to agree with her. But I wasn't so sure. “What can it hurt, really? I mean, at least for the summer, right? Lots of students work full time during the summer and don't take any classes. If we still think it'll be a problem, I'm sure the professor won't mind me switching back to our old system in the fall.”
It took another half hour listening to Steve talk in circles before she agreed to let me work full time in the summer. I'm not sure whether she could have stopped me. I might have had an easier time in college if I had ever taken the time to figure out where the actual lines of authority are drawn there. Steve talked like she could have prevented it, but I can't help but feel like she would have stopped me if she'd been allowed. She spent a lot of time trying to persuade me for someone who wasn't allowed to just say 'no.'
In the end, I was going to work full-time for Hansen over the summer, to be 're-evaluated' in August. I did have to take one class every morning at nine during the summer semester: a study skills class that focused on time management. So very much fun.
Hansen had finished playing with the dust by the time the drive was clean and Steve and I had finished hashing things out. The metal shavings I had swept apparently came from a few chips knocked out of the alligator clamps that had held the iron sheet as well as from the light fixture that had been shattered, but the soot had stumped him. A lot of it was vaporized iron. But the rest was tricky. It wasn't the sulfur dioxide stuff that we would have seen from a burn, but there was a heavy carbon content. After mass spec testing, microscope examination, and all sorts of other tests involving most of the labs on campus, he determined that the dust was just cellulose. Wood – plant stuff. But not. It had been confusing because normally you can see cell walls and fibers when you look at cellulose. This stuff had been broken down almost to the molecular level. But what we had thought was smoke was just really, really fine sawdust.
What really bugged him was that he couldn't figure out where it had come from. It's not like we use any wood in the lab. Even the furniture was all plastic and steel. Or aluminum, I guess. Whatever, none of it was wood. We didn't even have any of that plastic finish painted like wood.
He was finally working with the iron sheet when I started full-time. He had ignored it for a while – he just assumed that it had melted briefly in the overload. It was when he swabbed it to see if the dust was different on the sheet that he realized that something was different. The white color wasn't just a layer on the iron – no matter how we swabbed, scraped, or ground the thing we couldn't get any samples off the sheet. Once the dust was cleaned off you really couldn’t call it beige anymore – it was just white. Maybe pearly? It kinda glistened a bit in the light.
We couldn't bend it, either. The thing was thin, barely more than foil. I had to be careful even with the steel-titanium alloy to make sure I didn't bend it too much to fit in the drive. The iron sheet may have been fairly rigid, but it wasn't that strong. I had actually broken a few sheets early on where it cracked instead of bent.
Now, this metal was so tough it got silly. As soon as we realized we couldn't get a sample of the new, white material, we escalated. A rag and elbow grease didn't accomplish anything, but neither did steel wool, a heavy rasp for sharpening saws, an angle grinder, a diamond grinder, the big drill the geology department used to take core samples in bedrock, or the little grinder for cutting gemstones that we borrowed from a jeweler. We also caused some problems when we turned the university’s five-petawatt laser on it. The metal heated up a bit, but it mostly refracted the beam around the room in unexpected directions, scorching the walls.
We propped up the sheet (which we were calling a bar now) between two posts and took hammers and weights to it, and got nothing. No movement or bending was detectable at all, even when we used a hydraulic press with the laser micrometer keeping track.
Hansen even pulled some strings and got us into the firing range at a local national guard station. They shot the bar up with all sorts of fun stuff, up to and including depleted uranium slugs from a fifty cal rifle. Not even a scratch, although one guardsman took a nasty ricochet hit to his hip towards the end of the testing.
I didn't get to do any of that though, I was just driving Hansen around and managing his appointments with other labs and facilities.
Well before the summer was up, Hansen gave up trying to identify the thing we had made. It was hard, it was tough, and it broke the scales of anything we used to try and quantify its properties. It also conducted electricity pretty well, although he was able to measure that easily enough. Don't ask me the numbers, I'm sure they're in a textbook somewhere, all I remember is that the bar was more efficient than copper wires, but not quite as efficient as fiber optics.
So, after exhausting his dead ends, we got to try to recreate the experiment. It didn't go terribly well. Hansen got more growly than normal, and I was almost worried that he was going to fire me. He did kick me out of the lab a few times. We recreated the experiment as precisely as we could but couldn't duplicate the results. Same iron (it was about as pure of iron as you can get – wrought iron with less than a fifth of a percent of carbon - same shape, same charge. A couple of times the iron would break – a clean crack across the sheet that broke the circuit. More often the wiring above would break somewhere. But no smoke, no bang, no strange white metal.
Hansen was constantly grilling me, looking for precise details. We adjusted the light in the room, the amount of fuel in the generator, fiddled with the thermostat in case it had been warmer or colder in the room. I spent twenty hours or so tracking down the source of the iron, figuring out where it had been smelted, where it had been refined, mined, and so on.
The point where I think Hansen almost fired me was when I finally remembered that I had put a piece of linoleum down to protect the glass. That was the key. Glass on the bottom, a layer of linseed oil, rosin, and calcium carbonate lined with burlap, and the iron placed on top. But that all happened after I listened to an hour and a half rant about limiting variables and recording every detail. I remember being impressed that he avoided profanity while still insulting my intelligence with a huge assortment of words that just mean “dumb.”
Once he wound down, we fired up the drive to let a bit of plasma pass through the iron, and somehow the metal and linoleum broke up, combined, and slapped against the glass before hardening again. And it did it again, and again, and again. In the end, we repeated it a good hundred times – not only was it repeatable, but the rest of the drive never broke down during the test either. It was always the iron sample that broke first, transmuting into a white, unbreakable material.
Don't ask me why or how or what is actually happening. It’s not just my ignorance either, the way certain metals and organic compounds behave around plasma is one of those gaps in the Grand Theory of Everything that theoreticians like to talk about. The only thing I know for certain is that all the cellulose from the burlap in the linoleum was what made most of the thick cloud every time we fired.
“This is huge.” Hansen was holding a little slug of our new metal. “Like, discovery of metalworking huge, writing huge, fire huge. The wheel doesn't even compare.”
“I know. I can't imagine what you couldn't make with the stuff.”
We had a glass cup set up with some linoleum wadded up inside it. The iron would jump and fill the cup with a white plug, moving horizontally several inches to fall inside. “It all depends on what we can mold out of it. It'll be tough to make things where every piece is molded against a single side. If we put too much iron in, it'll be too thick and you're stuck with a piece that you can't get rid of. Too little, same problem. And one side will always be flat, whatever you've molded on the other.”
“But still. That's just a matter of planning and design. If we can make a mold and get the measurements right, we can pretty much make any solid piece we want.”
Which led to the important question:
“So, what do we call it?”